In 1902, Holly Mount School in Bury was shut down following a scandal over alleged brutality against the children. The next year, the House of Commons noted that one reason why the abuse was allowed to continue for so long was because of infrequent and cursory inspections, which one MP said were nothing but ‘hard officialdom’. Over a century later, it seems little has changed: school inspections are still ‘hard officialdom’.
Ofsted’s reputation for being bureaucratic, punitive and demoralising has only worsened since the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry in 2023, after her primary school was downgraded to ‘inadequate’. Ofsted has proposed a series of reforms, but Julia Waters, Ruth Perry’s sister, has argued that the new system is ‘rushed’ and ‘fails to learn’; it is simply repeating all the ‘same risks as before.’
Teachers are no longer expected to just be subject specialists, but disciplinarians, mental health champions, surrogate social workers, pastoral role models, PSHE experts and parents by proxy
She is right: the new ‘report card’ is a rushed botch job. All it does is promise semantic tweaks rather than actual reform. Rather than a single-word judgement, schools will now be graded on nine areas: leadership, curriculum, teaching, achievement, behaviour, attendance, personal development and well-being, and inclusion and safeguarding. Each area will then be ranked in a traffic-light system as either ‘causing concern’, ‘attention needed’, ‘secure’, ‘strong’, or ‘exemplary’, with Nandos-style colour-coding for emphasis.
Bridget Phillipson can boast all she likes that these report cards will give ‘rich, granular insight’ and allow Ofsted to better ‘tailor its support’ for struggling schools. Yet all Ofsted has actually done is broaden the assessment criteria for schools, and put the single-word judgements through a thesaurus. It was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this does the exact opposite. This approach is not only more complicated but more demanding, as schools must demonstrate more and more with less and less time.
A more detailed report card only works if inspectors and schools are given the time, space and resources to make fair and consistent judgements. Any changes to the process therefore need to be practical rather than linguistic: they should look at how the inspections are conducted, as well as what criteria to include. Currently, inspectors are usually only in schools for one or two days, which is nowhere near enough time to make a trustworthy, holistic and contextualised judgement about a school. Before 2005, inspectors were there for at least a week, in teams of up to 15 people; now on average there are around four.
This slimming down of the service explains why inspections have been reduced to a tick-box, regulatory exercise, but one with potentially damning consequences. Trust between Ofsted and schools has completely broken down, and there seem to be only two options for repairing this relationship. The first is to reduce the expectations placed on schools by bringing Ofsted back to its core purpose. Over the years, Ofsted has moved away from primarily evaluating teaching and learning, and now makes critical decisions in dozens of peripheral areas where expectations are higher and higher. By continually expanding its remit, Ofsted has become about overreach rather than rigour.
However, this first option seems unlikely to happen. Teachers are no longer expected to just be subject specialists, but disciplinarians, mental health champions, surrogate social workers, pastoral role models, PSHE experts and parents by proxy. The ever-increasing range of roles and duties means ever-increasing ways in which schools can be held accountable. This seems to be reflected in the proposed report card, which wants to broaden the scope of inspections rather than minimise them.
This leaves the second option. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Ofsted needs more time in schools, not less. Too many schools currently operate in a culture of fear because they know that they may be called upon to prove a dizzying amount of evidence at a moment’s notice, and that their reputation hinges on a 48-hour inspection snapshot. The current brevity of inspections has eroded trust in the process: in a survey of over 11,000 teachers, over two thirds of respondents agreed that an inspection could not accurately judge a school in three days or fewer, and just 10 per cent of secondary school teachers said that the judgements were very useful for parents. This scepticism is also an important factor behind the teacher recruitment and retention crisis: in an NEU survey, 92 per cent of teachers said that inspections were a source of major stress.
This myopic obsession with single word judgements therefore misses the wider picture: the way these inspections are conducted is currently not fit for purpose. If we want to judge schools by more measures, then we need more inspectors, more training for inspectors, and more time for inspectors to properly evaluate a school. If we want report cards to be thorough and comprehensive, then the inspections themselves need to be thorough and comprehensive, and not done on a shoe-string in a whirlwind.
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